Diogenes, who carried his tub on his back.

There are moods in which this kind of history is infinitely
refreshing. These creatures whom we affect to look down upon as
the drudges of instinct are members of a commonwealth whose
constitution rests on immovable bases. never any need of
reconstruction there! *They* never dream of settling it by vote that
eight hours are equal to ten, or that one creature is as clever as
another and no more. *They* do not use their poor wits in
regulating God's clocks, nor think they cannot go astray so long as
they carry their guide-board about with them,--a delusion we often
practise upon ourselves with our high and mighty reason, that
admirable finger-post which points every way and always right. It
is good for us now and then to converse with a world like Mr.
White's, where Man is the least important of animals. But one who,
like me, has always lived in the country and always on the same
spot, is drawn to his book by other occult sympathies. Do we not
share his indignation at that stupid Martin who had graduated his
thermometer no lower than 4o above zero of Fahrenheit, so that in
the coldest weather ever known the mercury basely absconded into
the bulb, and left us to see the victory slip through our fingers, just
as they were closing upon it? No man, I suspect, ever lived long in
the country without being bitten by these meteorological ambitions.
He likes to be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed
up, to have more trees and larger blow down than his neighbors.
With us descendants of the Puritans especially, these weather-
competitions supply the abnegated excitement of the race-course.
Men learn to value thermometers of the true imaginative
termperament, capable of prodigious elations and corresponding
dejections. The other day (5th July) I marked 98o in the shade, my